I’ve been using Clipgrab (macOS) to download music (mp3s) from YouTube. I’ve seen some mentions that the quality (real bitrate as opposed to what the file states) is bad to begin with on YouTube and that downloaders might make it worse. How bad is the quality of what I’m downloading? Any better downloaders or does the quality suck to begin with?

  • twistedtxb@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong:

    Separate audio is rarely available on streaming sites like YouTube, so if you’re ripping a song from it, you essentially are transcoding the files three times:

    • Encoding by the content creator
    • Extracting the audio from the the content
    • Encoding in the format of choice

    So no matter how great the quality is at either of these transcoding ends, you are still transcoding in lossy format at least two times

  • CanOpener@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    YouTube audio quality isn’t amazing, but it’s not that bad if you get the right format. Using yt-dlp, you can get opus audio that sounds way better than mp3. Example: yt-dlp -f 251 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ